Top 10 Worldwide CIO Agenda 2019 Predictions

By Joe Pucciarelli – November 1, 2018

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This blog lists the top 10 worldwide predictions for the CIO. Tech suppliers will also find this helpful in understanding the agenda of the CIO. These technology predictions are meant to help the enterprise with strategic planning within the typical five-year business planning cycle.

In the multiplied innovation economy, enterprises are racing to reinvent themselves as the pace of digital transformation (DX) becomes exponential. The digital train is leaving the station, and CIOs are rushing to transform their IT organizations before they lose relevance to their businesses. The most effective CIOs are reinventing IT from top to bottom and creating new digital platforms with agile connectivity while modernizing and rationalizing to jettison the ballast of obsolete systems. They are also reinventing customer, employee, and partner experiences to strengthen trust and resilience while learning to live with and manage risks posed by AI and machine learning (ML) by reinventing IT governance. Moreover, they are reinventing IT leadership, by orchestrating armies of bots and automated processes in addition to leading people. CIOs are reinventing IT through IT transformation (ITX).

IDC provides IDC's top 10 predictions for the 2019 CIO Agenda. These predictions provide a strategic context that will enable CIOs to lead their organizations through a period of multiplied innovation and disruption over the next 5 years. They also lay out IDC's vision for the 10 most important shifts that will happen in IT organizations over the next 60 months and will help senior IT executives in the formation of their strategic IT plans.

Prediction 2: Compelled to curtail IT spending, improve enterprise IT agility, and accelerate innovation, 70% of CIOs will aggressively apply data and AI to IT operations, tools, and processes by 2021.

Prediction 3: By 2022, 65% of enterprises will task CIOs to transform and modernize governance policies to seize the opportunities and confront new risks posed by AI, ML, and data privacy and ethics.

Prediction 4: Through 2022, 75% of successful digital strategies will be built by a transformed IT organization, with modernized and rationalized infrastructure, applications, and data architectures.

Prediction 5: By 2020, 80% of IT executive leadership will be compensated based on business KPIs and metrics that measure IT's effectiveness in driving business performance and growth, not IT operational measures.

Prediction 6: By 2020, 60% of CIOs will initiate a digital trust framework that goes beyond preventing cyberattacks and enables organizations to resiliently rebound from adverse situations, events, and effects.

Prediction 7: By 2022, 75% of CIOs who do not shift their organizations to empowered IT product teams to enable digital innovation, disruption, and scale will fail in their roles.

Prediction 8: Through 2022, the talent pool for emerging technologies will be inadequate to fill at least 30% of global demand and effective skills development and retention will become differentiating strategies.

Prediction 9: By 2021, 65% of CIOs will expand agile/DevOps practices into the wider business to achieve the velocity necessary for innovation, execution, and change.

Prediction 10: By 2023, 70% of CIOs who cannot manage the IT governance, strategy, and operations divides between LOB-dominated edge computing, operational technology, and IT will fail professionally.

Learn more about the 2019 CIO Agenda PredictionsFor context around these predictions, including the IT impact and guidance on how to integrate each prediction in the digital strategy of the enterprise, view the IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CIO Agenda 2019 Predictions web conference on-demand.